Comic for Thursday July 24th, 2003

I don't have much to talk about right now. Actually I take that back. I have just discovered recently something that should come to quite a shock for some of you that I know personally. As anyone reading this comic can see, my work is influenced heavily by manga and anime. The very first anime I seriously got into was Saint Seiya, which I saw on TV while visiting Japan. My thoughts and fondness for it have waned and peaked, but there is no denying the impact it had on my life and on the lives of my friends.

Point in hand, back in the day we actually thought that we could make a Saint Seiya movie and proceeded to make suits of armor for ourselves. This took a few days some very intensive labor. In the end, we came to our senses, but the fact that we even managed to delude ourselves to work for hours gives you an idea of the weight this anime had for us.

Even more amazing about the whole thing is that my friends had only seen 3 shows total of the series and I hadn't seen much more. Instead we relied on my collection of manga books which I think were in the middle of the Poseidon saga storyline-wise. I should also mention that at this point I had not taught myself how to read Japanese. So on the basis what little we could fathom from looking at the books and gleaming what we could from the few shows we watched, we still grew to love it.

The whole point being that most people know that Saint Seiya lasted just long enough to get through to the end of the Poseidon chapter, with Asgard being the best. We all knew the manga went one chapter further to the end of the Hades chapter. Like most Saint Seiya fans, we always thought it was a shame that the Hades Chapter never made it to anime. I am here to inform you that somehow, someway, someone decided to make the Hades chapter and it now exists as a 13 part OVA series.

I myself have seen a few of the shows and they are AMAZING!!! Any fan of Saint Seiya would be in bliss. The art is top notch and is on par if not better then the art of the 3rd Saint Seiya movie. CG effects have been added to add something to the powers of our beloved Saints, and for the most part it is not overdone or made to look badly out of place. Plus it had Gold Saints up the F'in wazoo. Anyway here is a French site that I found that has some pics for you to check out. Be sure to click on the image link on the frame panel on the left.

Okay Spirit 38... I apologize for the somewhat low brow title, but you gotta take them when you can get them. My thoughts on this strip was that it starts out with a bang and then just peters out to BLAH. I mean the first panel is spot on, the second gives you a technically correct Schwinn banana bicycle. Yuki's expression somewhat makes up for the bad composition in panel 3 and then panel 4... BLAH. It's like I was like this is great and then just stopped thinking halfway through. And the joke, I don't even want to go into how many rewrites there were only to end with this sub par final draft.

On a happy note, we should be coming up quickly to our very first major battle!!! I promise to make it as exciting and action packed as possible!!

River got his ass beat by this strip.